Hot Guacamole: Avocado Theft in North County

Almost as surely as avocados grow, thieves steal them and turn the fruit into quick and untraceable cash. Over the past decade, San Diego County law enforcement agencies have stepped up patrols, pursuits, and prosecution of avocado thieves, but growers report that most of the bandits get away. With them goes roughly $1 million of low-hanging fruit each year, and the men and women who grow the avocados are frustrated to their wits’ ends. Al Stehly has installed fences around his groves, topped them off with barbed wire, and secured his gates with chains and locks. So has Charley Wolk, who manages avocado groves throughout northern San Diego County. Farmer Steve Taft has mounted video cameras on his gates.

But thieves, who often work by the light of a full moon, simply ignore the cameras, cut the fences, and break the chains. This year, Stehly has already been hit several times. He owns 60 acres of Hass avocados near Valley Center and manages another 300. Much of this land is remote, without neighbors, and accessible by dirt roads leading off nearby highways — facilitating fast arrivals and swift getaways. Tire tracks, cut fences, and stripped trees are often the only signs Stehly ever sees of thieves — and estimating what’s been lost during a night’s raid is sometimes impossible.

“If you don’t know exactly what was on the trees to begin with, there’s no way to know what you lost,” he said.

But farmers with a close eye on their trees can estimate. Wolk has seen as much as 5000 pounds of avocados vanish from his trees overnight, and farmers have reported individual losses of 10 percent of their income per year. Taft guesses he loses nearly $5000 to avocado thieves annually. He owns and manages 1000 acres of orchards in Riverside and San Diego counties and may be buffered from severe economic damage by the size of his operation, but for smaller growers, much or most of the year’s income can potentially vanish overnight. Stehly, for example, lost almost an entire crop one night in the early 1980s, when a well-organized band of thieves stripped the fruit from several hundred trees — the most severe instance of avocado theft of which he knows.

“They took tens of thousands of pounds,” said Stehly, who says that most, if not all, crop-insurance plans do not cover theft. “I try not to remember that one. One week we had a whole crop ready to go, and the next week we went in and it was all gone.”

Though Eric Larson, the executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau, told of a case last year in which avocado thieves fired a gun at a grove manager who had confronted the men as they toted filled sacks off the property, Sergeant Bob Bishop says most thieves are not dangerous. The detective sergeant has pursued avocado thieves since joining the Valley Center Substation of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department 24 years ago.

“They’re usually going to do whatever they can to avoid a conflict,” said Bishop. “Usually the farmers are more confrontational than the crooks.”

In fact, if a thief can go unseen, he or she is almost guaranteed to make a clean getaway, according to Bishop. He says that the discovery of stripped fruit trees days or even hours after thieves have left the premises virtually never leads to an arrest. But in the easiest cases, property owners report a theft in progress, and if responding officers arrive at the scene to find the suspected thieves’ vehicle still parked onsite, an arrest is almost a guarantee.

“In that case, we’ll sit and wait,” Bishop said. “Then when they come out of the grove with sacks of fruit, it’s a slam dunk.”

Other cases aren’t so simple. According to Elisabeth Silva, the county’s deputy district attorney who has specialized in prosecuting agricultural criminals for 15 years, some thieves don’t even know they’re stealing, hired instead by professional crooks posing as landowners who drop the workers off at a site, leave them with a phone number, and ask them to call when the trees are stripped and their bags full.

“We’ve actually had armed sheriffs approach a group of illegal pickers who say, ‘Sorry, not now — we’ve got a job to do,’” Silva said.

State laws are stacked disproportionately against fruit thieves. Whereas most stolen nonfood items must be valued at more than $950 to trigger felony grand theft charges, the threshold for stolen farm crops is just $250. Roughly four or five cases per year lead to convictions in San Diego County, which can send fruit thieves to jail for up to three years.

But most thieves are not arrested, according to Bishop, and most stolen avocados are not recovered. Where thieves sell their loot is largely a matter of conjecture. Big supermarkets and wholesale houses are unlikely to buy fruit unaccompanied by receipts and paperwork — required by anyone in California possessing more than 25 pounds of avocados. Most victimized farmers speculate that mom-and-pop restaurants and roadside fruit stands buy the swiped fruit. Some thieves are known to sell directly out of their vehicles.

“If the price is too good to be true at the roadside, then the avocados probably came from someone’s farm in the middle of the night,” Stehly said.

Law enforcement officers keep an eye on roadside fruit stands, though Bishop notes that regular, long-term establishments tend to keep a clean record. It’s those that show up overnight that raise suspicions.

“We’ll pull over and check them out, and the first thing we ask is ‘Do you have a business license?’” Bishop said. “They also need a manifest showing where the fruit came from.”

Stolen avocados can sometimes be easily identified. Legitimate pickers use clippers to remove each fruit from the branch, Bishop explains, leaving each avocado bearing the stub of its stem. Thieves, however, often hurried and hustling, tend to pull the fruit off the trees by hand.

Comments

Where do all those stolen avocados go? Even though we now see Mexican avocados in the stores for sale, there's a good chance some of those stolen in the US actually end up south of the border. Guacamole is very popular stuff, even when it gets expensive to make. It also seems likely that many of them are peddled to small restaurants and stands here and up through LA. Remember that LA is a very big market for almost anything. If I had a trunkful of stolen fruit, I'd probably head for LA/Orange County, where the matter of how the fruit was picked and whether it had "papers" is not a big deal.

While this sort of theft is impossible to completely stop, the growers who are serious have many tools available, and should be able to keep it at a low level. But first you have to want to stop it, and then you must be willing to incur some cost. Absentee owners of groves may not really care that much, and prefer to keep their outlays as small as possible.

I doubt much of it winds up in Mexico. Avocados are a staple here, they are plentiful and cheaper than in the U.S. Were there a great demand and a higher price, then perhaps it would be worth it to smuggle them into Mexico, but my guess is that they can be sold in the U.S. for a much better profit. If it was clothes or shoes that were stolen, then Mexico would be a perfect destination. But with avocados, I would doubt it.

thiefs, sellers, buyers esentially partners, don't we have licenceing, sales tax/?
up north apples ,peaches,peats plums on an on dont seem to have this problem
i guesss the law enforcement in cali is a little lax in investigation compared to other states

"you either part of the solution or part of the problem" ...i have heard said.